Noor Alzamami (2019)

Noor Alzamami is a queer, gender neutral femme of color. They have spent their lives as an observer as well as an advocate, learning the importance of stories and the individual's truth.

Joining OHMA is a thrilling new adventure on the heels of working with queer, housing insecure or unhoused youth in King County Washington as a Youth Programs Coordinator. There they empowered youth to explore their truth and tell their stories as experts who are paid to dispel the myth of a monolithic queer experience.

Previous to this position Noor's past experience includes working with and for unhoused people in the Pacific Northwest, teaching as a sex educator, organizing and activism in the queer community as well as in reproductive justice. Personally Noor is passionate about travel, creative healing and radical softness.

Eleonora Anedda (2019)

Eleonora Anedda was born in Muravera, Italy; she was raised in a small town in Sardinia and spent most of her life inhaling the clean Mediterranean breeze. In 2015 she began attending history classes at the University of Cagliari. Three years later, she was awarded a first-level degree in History with a dissertation on the trial of Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. The following summer, she assisted Roberto Ludovico, Director for the Centre of Italian Studies in Amherst - University of Massachusetts, in Turin’s Archives, with a research project on the socio-economic value of a royal banquet of the Savoy family. For Eleonora, it was fascinating to participate in the process of scientific research. She moved to London in 2018 to pursue a Master in Queer History at Goldsmiths College. Working on sources from Boston’s archives she graduated with a dissertation on gay conversion therapy practices in the US. Eleonora’s background in Women’s Studies and Early Modern Age Europe has given her a solid foundation to explore Contemporary LGBTQ+ History. Capturing the voices of minorities and the less represented has always been at the heart of her research interests; which is why she is honoured to have been an OHMA student. This course was more than an academic experience, it gave her the opportunity to grow both as a historian and as a person.When she isn’t glued to her computer she enjoys taking care of her eleven orchids, eating tagliatelle, going for long walks with her dog, swimming, and buying more orchids.

Steve Fuchs (2016)

Steve Fuchs is currently C.E.O. of True North, Inc., a NYC-based digital advertising agency he co-founded twenty-two years ago. A New York native, he is looking forward to becoming a student (part-time) after thirty-seven years in the work force.

Steve’s parents and family emigrated from Cuba in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, just as the political landscape was changing. He grew up hearing many stories about life before and after Castro took power—oral histories from family members who experienced historic changes in real time. Perhaps this is where his interest in oral history began.

Steve graduated from Syracuse University in 1979 and currently serves on the Board of Advisors to the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications.  He is also a passionate New York Rangers hockey fan and tries to take in as many games as possible during the season. He is looking forward to becoming a part of the Columbia community.

Christina Barba (2017)

Christina Barba is an oral historian and attorney. She received her B.A. from Princeton University in 2002 and her J.D. from American University in 2006. She spent the majority of her legal career as an Assistant District Attorney prosecuting public corruption at the Bronx DA’s Office. Currently, she is a Hearing Officer for the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings where she adjudicates administrative law matters as an impartial judge and issues written decisions post-hearing. 

Christina received her M.A. from Columbia University in 2020 after completing the OHMA Program. She was recognized as the runner-up for the 2020 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award based on her capstone project, which included a short video that makes tangible the theoretical concept of postmemory. Using testimony from an Armenian Genocide survivor and his daughter, her project explored the transmission of memory, inherited trauma and the convergence of personal and transgenerational memory. Christina is currently working on an oral history project with artists who are 2nd or 3rd generation Armenian Genocide survivors. She resides in Manhattan with her two children and husband.

Darold Cuba (2018)

Darold is a social impact innovator and entrepreneur, a Center for Public Leadership Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Ivy League's first Wikipedia Fellow, and the inaugural Oral History Fellow at the Washington National Cathedral. With a background at the intersections of media, politics and business, his work has spanned disciplines of journalism, oral history, theater, film, tv, art, advertising/PR/marketing, communications and digital technology.

He founded #HackingRacism at the Columbia Business School’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Incubator (IE@Columbia), ℅’17 to help people dismantle systemic white supremacy and institutional racism in their everyday lives. That in turn incubated #MappingFreedom, the public-facing, crowd-sourced, open knowledge, open access, open source, knowledge equity, digital & emerging technology initiative which interactively documents and digitally maps all of the "freedom colonies" on the planet. (Since the inception of Western colonialism, the targeted peoples escaped the terrorism of Racialized Inheritable Phenotypic One-Drop - Chattel Atlantic Slave Trade Economy (RIPOD-CASTE) - his terminology - slavery, indigenous mass genocides, Jim Crow, Black Codes, and other human rights abuses, creating their own “colonies of freedom” and successfully protecting these “safe spaces.”) Powered by Google’s GIS technology, this interactive map seeks to also digitally recreate these communities at varying stages and times in their histories. He then founded the International Association of Freedom Colonies (iAFC) and its Oral History Archives to advocate for this “international phenomenon of freedom colonies" around the world.

He co-founded #DisruptWikipedia with the Columbia University and Barnard College libraries (where he was the first Wikimedian-In-Residence) to “disrupt, dismantle and eliminate the settler colonial bias causing the digital and tech colonialism on the world's largest site for knowledge” and is incubating the WikiHBCU/DIO initiative to establish a “wiki presence” (Fellow, Resident and/or Scholar) at every “historically ‘black’ college, university, department, institution and organization on the planet” at the Washington National Cathedral, where he leads the Cathedral’s inaugural video oral history project “Thus Saith Our Souls: The African-American Experience in the Episcopal Church” (#AAinTEC) and serves on the Racial Justice Taskforce. Launching on Juneteenth, this inaugural oral history project from the nation’s cathedral explores the history of those branded “black” in the country’s oldest colonial religion, and its journey to reconcile its history in a forward facing process of reconciliation and reparations. Cuba also serves on the New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s Reparations and Racial Reconciliation Committee, and Trinity Church Wall Street’s Achieving Racial Equity Commission.

An alumnus of The New York Times, Vice Media, TriBeCa Enterprises, and Fox Home Entertainment, his 2015 VICE Feature of the Year “The Loud Fight Against Silicon Valley’s Quiet Racism: How Tech Became A Civil Rights Battleground” explored the efforts of people and organizations working to eradicate racism and other such settler colonial bias/tech colonialism issues in the tech industry. He wrote the NYT’s "Not Forgotten" columns on Emmett Till & Medgar Evers, was a data journalist on the first Trump/Clinton debate, interviewed Wu-Tang’s RZA (Robert Diggs) live-scoring his favorite kung-fu film, and is the film producer of its 2017 College Scholarship Program.

His work actively dismantles the settler colonial narrative, perspective, lens and worldview of the “colonizer culture” - especially the effects of digital/tech/data colonialism - through a process of decolonization and indigenization. This process includes disrupting and eliminating the “white gaze” (Morrison), the “white imagination” (Rankine), and the “colonized mind” (Fanon) of the “racecraft” (Fields) that create these institutional and systemic outputs that fail the “DuVernay Test” (Dargis) in the first place. Darold speaks and presents around the world on a variety of issues connected to his work, and is currently a Mid-Career Master of Public Administration (MC/MPA) candidate at Harvard. He holds an MA in Oral History from Columbia, and a BA in Theater from Temple.

Eileen Welsome (2018)

Eileen Welsome is a longtime author and journalist who began her career as a police reporter on the Texas-Louisiana border. She graduated from the University of Texas in Austin in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. In 1994, while working at the Albuquerque Tribune, she won the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for a series of stories on eighteen people who without their consent were injected with plutonium during the Manhattan Project. Her first book, The Plutonium Files, grew out of that project. Her reporting has appeared alongside of such legends as Ida Tarbell, Edward R. Murrow, John Steinbeck, and John Muir in the anthology Muckraking: The Journalism that Changed America. She has testified twice before Congress, once about the plutonium patients and a second time when lawmakers were preparing to amend the Freedom of Information Act to include electronic records.

Eileen has long been interested in the untold stories behind the vast nuclear weapons program and the individuals who were exposed to harmful amounts of radiation by accident or by design. They included some of America’s most vulnerable populations: orphans in Massachusetts given radioactive oatmeal for breakfast; pregnant women in Tennessee who ingested radioiodine ‘cocktails’; uranium miners on the Colorado Plateau who developed lung cancers from high levels of radon; and atomic veterans who marched to Ground Zero minutes after atomic bombs had been detonated. She’s also interested in exploring what global technologists are saying about artificial intelligence and the ways in which AI could trigger a new arms race.

Long before the problem of abuse in the Catholic Church became a national issue, she and her colleagues wrote about dozens of priests who were shipped to an outpost in New Mexico for rehabilitation and then set free to abuse children in remote parishes; she exposed how wild animals, such as elk and longhorn sheep, were being captured in New Mexico and other parts of the West so that their antlers could be ground up into elixirs and potions; she revealed how a monopolistic utility company raised its rates to exorbitant levels while simultaneously awarding  top executives handsome bonuses. More recently, she has written about the medical caregivers in Denver and Boston who established the nation’s first community healthcare centers in the 1960s, advancing the idea that healthcare was a human right and not a privilege. These dedicated men and women hired people in the neighborhoods to work in the clinics and by doing so, improved the lives of three generations of families.

Eileen is eager to learn more about the digital methods of collecting and archiving stories, as well as the theories and methods behind the collection of oral histories so that she can develop richer and more complete records of the people who have shared their lives with her.  

Renaldo McClinton (2018)

Renaldo McClinton is a native of Shreveport, Louisiana. He is a musician and a professional actor who has done various work with numerous equity theaters both nationally and internationally. He is credited with work on major motion films as well. Renaldo graduated with his Bachelor's degree from Louisiana State University where he studied theatre performance. He then went on to study classical acting with a concentration in Shakespeare and Jacobean text at George Washington University's MFA program in Washington, DC. After spending some time in the classroom as a history teacher, he is excited to continue his studies at Columbia University in order to explore the connection between art, culture, oral history, and storytelling.

Eunice Kim (2018)

Eunice Kim has a BA in History and a MA in Oral History. Before OHMA, she worked at the Richard B. Russell Libraries in Athens, Georgia and General Federation of Women’s Clubs in Washington D.C. for Public History. In 2018, she wrote, “Southern Women and the Anti-Lynching Movement, 1930-1942,” which won the Alf Andrew Heggoy Award for Best Senior Thesis Paper. It explores the stories of Southern women activists who helped prevent racial violence in the Jim Crow South and influenced women’s and civil rights history. 

At Columbia, she wrote an oral history thesis, “Healing: A Bridge with a View (Sexual Violence & Trauma Survivors’ Stories from Oral History Interviews).” It highlights the narratives of sexual assault survivors. The project also covers how institutions abuse Title IX and the Clery Act. Since writing the project, Kim has worked with victims, survivors, and activists to collect and listen to unspoken stories of gender-based violence. She believes that storytelling can make a difference in changing policies and for cultivating empathy and healing from trauma.

She currently serves on the board of Atlanta Women for Equality.

Caroline Cunfer (2018)

Caroline graduated from New York University last year where she studied in an interdisciplinary global studies program and minored in French.  Her senior thesis at NYU used the voices of people living in Paris during the November 13, 2015 terror attacks to investigate how voice-based art could re-work responses to divisive political trauma in an attempt to reconnect populations that felt driven apart.  A year later she found out this methodology was otherwise known as oral history.  She is looking forward to combining her love of language, conversation, human connection, theatre, and storytelling at OHMA.

Anne Cardenas (2018)

Anne Cardenas is an Oral Historian and Audio Producer. She created the podcast “Grassroots & Hope: Campaigning for Obama” based on the interviews she conducted with 2008 Obama campaign staffers. Her other research interests include folklore, family histories,  Abraham Lincoln and American History. Anne is a proud Obama Administration alum, having worked at the White House & DHS, before moving to New York and working for VICE Media and the UNDP. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Florida State University in 2011 and completed her Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University in 2020. 

Nora Waters (2018)

Nora is an interdisciplinary oral historian. Nora's OHMA thesis "Stories We Tell of The River" is a collection of prints, photographs, interview transcripts, and creative non-fiction essays that unearths relationships to the Milwaukee River as a way to critically engage with the cities' segregated landscape. Currently, Nora is collaborating with the Lesbian Elders Oral Herstory Project.

Brad Bailey (2017)

Brad Bailey, originally from Moultrie, Georgia, is a recent graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. He received his B.A. from Yale University in Political Science and his Masters of Public Affairs from Princeton. Brad is an avid fan of telling stories, especially those from underexposed communities. At Columbia, he wants to delve even deeper into the methodological and analytical aspects of interviewing, while exploring the nexus of oral histories and journalism.

Holly Werner-Thomas (2017)

Holly Werner-Thomas is a writer and oral historian whose practice is grounded in historical scholarship and current events, but who has a passion for true stories no matter the topic. She is a graduate of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University, where she initiated an ongoing effort to capture the stories of gun violence victims (“The 40 Percent Project: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America”). Her documentary play based on the interviews, The Survivors, won the Columbia University 2020 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Holly is on an upcoming OHA panel this fall, “Is Oral History White? Investigating Race in Three Baltimore Oral History Projects.” She is also currently visiting oral history consultant for History Associates, Inc., leading projects for the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lemelson-MIT Program.

Alissa Funderburk (2017)

Alissa Rae Funderburk is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded Oral Historian for the Margaret Walker Center at the HBCU Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. She maintains an oral history archive that, like the Center, is dedicated to the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of African American history and culture. Previously, she created an oral history course for high school students at the Roger Lehecka Double Discovery Center and conducted freelance oral history interviews for the city of Jersey City.

While completing coursework in the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia, Alissa Rae served as the Deputy Director of the Columbia Life Histories Project alongside its co-founder Benji de la Piedra. Her OHMA thesis on the religious and spiritual experiences of Black men in New York City was based on her studies of race, culture, religion, and the African diaspora, when graduating from Columbia College in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology as a John W. Kluge Scholar. Alissa Rae is a native New Yorker, avid reader, and yoga enthusiast with a passion for travel.

Kim-Hee Wong (2018)

Word Search Wizard.

Hawaiian Hula Dancer.

Chinese Yum Cha Connisuer.

Korean Kim Chee Maker.

This is me: Kim-Hee Wong.

Aloha! Growing up in Hawaiʻi we are surrounded by lush green mountains, beautiful beaches and a variety of cultures and people from around the world. I love to run on the beach, hike mountains and chase waterfalls. When not listening to podcasts, my Spotify playlists rotates between pop, R&B, acoustic and Hawaiian music. Despite my experience as a Starbucks barista, I prefer to drink cups of green tea all day. I love going on adventures, trying new foods and exchanging stories of different communities and cultures. I am excited to share the moʻolelo, stories, of my people and bring their voices back to life. It is my hope that by doing so the aloha spirit will carry on.

Heesup Kimm (2018)

I earned my B.A. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Political Science. 

I have been searching vigorously for the opportunity that would help me develop certain skills I needed for my future projects and enable me to achieve my career goal which is to support and provide aids specific groups of individuals, especially the patients from minority backgrounds and the elderlies who have difficulties communicating with other cultures due to lack of language abilities. 

I am originally from Seoul, South Korea. And as an immigrant myself, who also has a non-native English speaking background, I've seen numerous people facing similar challenges due to their lack of local language skills. Not knowing the local language is the biggest obstacle in the way of successful expat assignments because it leads to bigger challenges like relocating family, finding appropriate housing, and organizing tax affairs, etc.

In addition to my recent research project at NYU, I have participated in a variety of volunteer services in different places including South Korea and the United States. As a volunteer, I not only found it rewarding in terms of what was achieved, but also discovered talents in myself that I had not appreciated before. 

I believe that the goals Columbia University's OHMA program pursues are no different from mine. I wish to make changes, no matter what sizes they are, that eventually sparks a big influence in our society, through new challenges and opportunities I will be experiencing in the near future. 

Rebecca McGilveray (2018)

Rebecca comes to Columbia from Glasgow, Scotland and is the first Scottish student to join the OHMA programme. She has recently graduated from the University of Strathclyde with a degree, with honours in History. At school, Rebecca never particularly enjoyed History – finding that it was less about understanding and more about passing an exam. She found more joy in listening to her grandparents and Great Aunts recalling their lives and the adventures they had been on. Only later on, while at university did she discover Oral History and finally found a discipline that felt intuitive and natural to her. Her dissertation ‘The Bucky Made Me Do It’: Exploring Glasgow’s relationship with Buckfast and its Impact on Crime, Deindustrialisation and the Glasgow Effect’ used oral history testimonials to form the backbone of her research into a heavily neglected aspect of Glasgow’s history. Her research interests include histories of addiction, toxic masculinity, homelessness and how conceptualisations of the body and self influence Oral History testimonies. She is looking forward to broadening her horizons outside the context of her home city and cannot wait to join this year’s cohort at OHMA.

Nairy Abdelshafy (2018)

Nairy is an enthusiastic social activist with a passion for community service and social work. An Egyptian Fulbright Scholar to the OHMA program, she draws from her experience to document movement and transition narratives for social change. She has worked and volunteered on non- formal education, self expression and intercultural learning with children, youth, adults and refugee communities for over ten years and has worked on documenting narratives of identity and movement with Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Cairo, New Damietta and Port Said, and Nubians' reflections on displacement in Aswan. She appreciates food, enjoys travel and believes one has to be laid back to be able to take on life and take in its beauty.

Carlin Liu Zia (2017)

Carlin Liu Zia is a polyhyphenate oral historian and maker whose questions include how we know what we know and how we came to be where we are. One of her favorite tools and one of her driving curiosities is silence.

Carlin is a graduate of OHMA, where her thesis Uncertain Journeys won the 2019 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History award. Uncertain Journeys, an epic poem in an invented form, records the life story of Carlin’s Chinese-born grandfather while simultaneously charting her own project of self-historicization. The first pages can be found on Oral History Works, along with an audio piece and short film created from the same fieldwork.

More recently, Carlin has worked on a range of projects across these similar themes of consciousness, movement, intergenerationality (she 100% doubts this is a word; she 99% agrees it shouldn’t be), and encounter. In summer 2020 she was an inaugural grantee of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative, collaborating with scholars and grassroots organizations in Greece to incorporate oral history, project-based learning, and digital exhibition methodologies into local migration and material history culture. Carlin is also an interviewer and transcriptionist for the Rikers Public Memory Project. She has lectured and taught workshops on transcription as a creative act, and recently co-authored the transcription style guide for an oral history memoir book project. She has freelanced across the field, from videography and post-production to qualitative research consultation. 

For the past two years leading up to her current appointment, Carlin has been working with OHMA as a Teaching Apprentice, and has co-curated the past three year-end fieldwork exhibits, including the first-ever fully virtual exhibit in Spring 2020. 

Carlin holds a BA with Distinction in English from Yale College. You can contact her at carlin.zia@columbia.edu.

Lynn Lewis (2017)

Lynn Lewis: I am a life-long social justice worker who believes in the power of collective analysis and direct action to win justice. Having witnessed the strength and resourcefulness of folks who have chosen to join with others in social justice work I am committed to document those stories and to amplify those lessons.  From housing struggles on the Lower East Side, to revolutionary Nicaragua and Venezuela, what has always inspired me is that each of us has the potential to make change. I met the co-founders of Picture the Homeless in 2000 just after its founding, and am honored to have worked with and learned from the incredible homeless leaders who together have built the only homeless led organization in NYC, and one of the few nationally for seventeen years. I wanted to learn the art and science of oral history to document the work of Picture the Homeless as well as other social movements, and to share those brilliant and nuanced organizing lessons. 

The OHMA program expanded my understanding of how to do that in so many ways.  It became an intellectual home and a place to initiate an oral history practice rooted in social justice.  As I began interviewing for the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project I started out thinking like an organizer with a tape recorder but engaging with an initial cohort of long time homeless leaders while I was in the program informed my praxis.  I’ve been calling this approach participatory oral history research (POHR).  Since graduating, I continue to deepen my understanding of oral history with the Picture the Homeless Oral History project.  My focus now is to continue interviewing but also to support the participation of the narrators who have committed to serve on the projects advisory board and to understand what that means, and what that will take.   I’ve begun integrating lessons embedded in the interviews in my work as a trainer in community organizing and have created short audio pieces that illustrate themes contained within the narrators stories. Facilitating a weekend retreat with a homeless organizing group in Baltimore revealed how powerfully organizing lessons can be transmitted via audio.

The Picture the Homeless Oral History project continues and I'm grateful for the opportunity to explore ways to create space for participation, collaboration and shared authority with the project's advisory board - and having fun making zines - I am working as consultant as a community organizing trainer and coach, a grant-writer. and as an adjunct professor Additionally, I'm working with a NYC social justice elder on their memoir, using oral history as a tool to gather stories and am excited to share that my article, “Love and Collective Resistance: Lessons from the Picture the Homeless Oral History Proect,” will be included in the forthcoming special Activist Lives thematic issue of Histoire sociale / Social History in 2020.